Love Notes

WB and I have been apart for almost two weeks, except for a brief two hour visit when he had a layover as he crisscrossed the country for a business trip. I'm okay with us being apart for a little while, but then it starts to wear on me. It reminds me of the days when we were apart more then we were together during our dating years.
We met at the end of the fall semester, dated a few weeks, then he was off to a small Panhandle town for a summer internship at a chemical company and I was going home for a month to my parent's house in Houston. We relied on phone conversations in the beginning and let me tell you we were not at our best with this form of communication. This is how our phone chats went:
"Hi, it's WB." (well, he said his real name)
"Hey, how are you?"
"Alright, you?"
"Fine." long pause which I would dread, so I would begin chattering about everything I'd done that day.
"Sounds good. I gotta go someone is at the door. I'll talk to you later."
"Oh, okay...bye."
Click
Every time I got off the phone with him I had doubts. Is he even interested? That's probably the last time I'll ever talk to him. Just who was at the door? Are we supposed to be dating other people? And on and on it went. I was clueless! You wonder how our relationship could survive long distance with calls like that don't you? It was the love notes. Yep, remember how people used to actually sit down with pen and paper, write a note and put it in the mail. Well, it wasn't that long ago, really. Anyway, in between these tortuous phone calls I would receive the sweetest notes in my mailbox. Sometimes a funny card, sometimes just a handwritten note to let me know he was thinking of me. If we had seen each other for the weekend he would tell me how wonderful a time he'd had and he was looking forward to our next visit.
I would cling to these notes, because it was in these notes that I learned who he really was, I heard him loud and clear, much clearer then over the phone. In fact, during our phone conversations when I'd ask him a bomb question like, "Do you want to date other people?" and his response came after a very lengthy pause, "Why do you?" and then I wanted to pull out my hair because shortly after that he had to get off the phone. But luckily the deer sweet mailman, who I really should have invited to our wedding, would arrive with a letter and in it WB would pour out his heart. He'd tell me that "no way" did he want to see other people, but he understood how it was hard when we were apart so much, and he wanted me to be happy. So then of course I'd have to send him back a letter telling him that I had no interest in seeing anyone else and how happy I was. And so it went.
We survived that summer and when he returned we'd only have a few short months before we'd once again be separated by distance. He spent a lot of money on postage!
Oh, gotta run, it's actually time for me to leave for the airport...WB is at this moment about to enter Texas air space, I've been checking his flight status. Darn, I wanted to tell you about the love notes tucked in my drawers and suitcases, or his quoting of Shakespeare or Keats...I'll have to do that another time!